Does the Higgs boson exist?
As of this writing in September 2010, the Higgs boson still eludes the scientific world. Physicists smash particle beams together at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator, but they’ve yet to find the so-far hypothetical elementary particle in the resulting subatomic debris. This leads to an inevitable question: Does the particle even exist? The standard model of particle physics certainly predicts that it does. This theoretical model of the universe encompasses elements from both Einstein’s theory of special relativity and quantum theory. It attempts nothing less than to define and explain the particles that make up all matter in our universe. While the standard model manages to explain much of the observable phenomena in the world around us, it also predicts things we haven’t yet found — such as the Higgs boson particle. In fact, the stand
